Medical first: Tot rids self of AIDS virus

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, March 29, 1995

A Los Angeles baby has eliminated the virus that causes AIDS from his body, the first documented case of its kind in medical history, the New England Journal of Medicine reported Wednesday.

The recovery, a ray of hope in the grim history of the AIDS epidemic, could advance medical understanding of how the body counters the virus and help show how resistance might be artificially created by a vaccine.

"It is so amazing," said Dr. Yvonne Bryson, a pediatrician who treated the boy and was a principal investigator of the study. "The thought that the body can have, then get rid of, the virus is very hopeful."

Elementary school in Oakland opens time capsule from 1927San Francisco Chronicle

Brides of March walk through San FranciscoSan Francisco Chronicle

WildCare rescues Western scrub jay from rodent glue trapWildCare

The Regulars: The CarpenterJessica Christian

Massive fire in San Francisco's North BeachDavid Essling

"Our results demonstrate that indeed the phenomenon of clearance of HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) can occur and may be under-recognized," said Dr. Irvin S.Y. Chen, co-investigator of the study and director of the UCLA AIDS Institute.

As a newborn and again at 2 months old, the boy was found to be carrying the AIDS virus in his blood, acquired at birth from his infected mother.

When he was 13 months old, the doctors looked again for the virus - but it was nowhere to be found.

The child, now 5, is a healthy kindergartner with no laboratory or physical evidence of HIV infection, researchers at UCLA say.

"It is thrilling, a wonderful story," Bryson, a professor of pediatric infectious diseases in the Department of Pediatrics at UCLA. "To tell the parents there is no hope . . . then to go back and say, "This is the most amazing thing, but your baby is no longer infected.' "

How did this baby fend off infection by the AIDS virus? The answer has potentially huge implications for drug and vaccine research.

Researchers believe the baby may have had a low-level infection so that the virus did not fully establish itself - and additionally, that his immune system aggressively fought off, and eventually overwhelmed, the intrusive virus.

They have not ruled out the possibility that the virus was defective and unable to adequately multiply.

Bryson has since identified another child who appears to have accomplished the same improbable feat. Studies are now under way to confirm the second case.

At first the researchers wondered whether there had been a mistake with their original cultures of the virus.

They wondered whether the early positive cultures were misclassified or had been inadvertently contaminated with the virus.

Luckily, they had saved the cultures and the child's cells from earlier tests - and by molecular techniques were able to prove there had been no mix-up.

The case was detected during a UCLA study that carefully tracked HIV-infected babies. But there is a possibility that the case is not unique - and that other cases have existed but have not been noticed by doctors.

The UCLA researchers are reviewing previous questionable cases and asking colleagues around the country to do the same. They caution, however, that the results should not give other HIV-infected people false hope.

"Every mother or HIV-positive person should not run to their doctor thinking that perhaps their infection is gone," Bryson said.

The study adds credence to the theory of natural resistance and raises the tantalizing possibility that the secret to fighting HIV may be hidden somewhere in the body itself.

For the last 13 years, researchers focused on the illness of AIDS. Now, they're looking at the flip side: why some people stay well.

People who stay uninfected, despite exposure, may fend off the virus by producing a proliferation of unusually aggressive "killer" cells, which destroy HIV-infected cells before the virus gains a toehold in the body. Similarly, people who are infected yet stay healthy may trigger the same immune mechanism.

It is possible that this is how the baby boy recovered from HIV, said UCLA doctors.&lt;